Promised Land Sugaree Mexicali Blues Dire Wolf Black Throated Wind Candyman Jack Straw Big Railroad Blues Big River Here Comes Sunshine El Paso Ramble On Rose Playin' In The Band
Set 2
Mississippi Half Step Me And Bobby McGee Row Jimmy Weather Report Suite Prelude > Weather Report Suite Part 1 > Let It Grow He's Gone > Truckin' > Nobody's Fault But Mine > Other One > Stella Blue > Around & Around
Audience material from source B (almost entirely)
Set I
Source a= soundboard shnid 97361 (not pitch-corrected)
Source b= Dan McDonald (droncit) audience flat transfer of cassette masters
Source b transferred with Nakamichi BX-1 adapted for flat transfer; eq applied with Diamond Cut Forensics 8.
Notes: I have put the longer audience, tuning, announcements, portions as separate tracks so that those who want the full
show will have that, while those who want only the music can eliminate those portions. The single exception is the beginning of Weather Report Suite,
which is announced as "for all you rowdies out there." Occasionally, there is variation in the vocal location. This appears to be some sort of anomaly between what was
recorded through the 'soundboard' tape and what actually went through the speakers.
Audience/tuning material from source B (almost entirely)
Dusborne did all the synchronization work. Droncit is responsible for the overall mix and sound.
Designed to be played loud. If your speakers aren't able to handle the bass, please get new speakers.
Thanks to TDK for making tapes that can hold up well for 40 years.
Thanks to Craig of Diamond Cut for all the help with the theory and eq curves.
Thanks to my dad for the electronics tweaks. 87 and going strong!
Thanks to Dusborne for all the synchronization work. Thanks to Mrs. Dusborne (Tina Usborne) for listening and offering opinions.
Thanks to Melinda B. (wherever you are) for help with the microphone/recorder and comments about Bob Weir's haircut.
Problems/Comments: droncit@yahoo.com
*last 7 minutes or so from source A only (rejoins during last vocal)
**about 16 seconds of the jam portion from Source B only.
***verse beginning "she comes from the town" source b only for about a minute
****source b only
*****almost all of Around & Around and all of Casey Jones are soundboard only
Reviewer:GageKarahkwiioDiabo
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December 20, 2023 (edited)
Subject:
On its fiftieth anniversary
The final performance of 1973 can seem like an odd choice for the introductory volume of the long-running Dick’s Picks series of “official bootleg”
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releases. The main arguments for its selection are undeniably the apex version of Here Comes Sunshine and the speaker-destroying meltdown jam in The Other One. (No joke: listening to it on CD at max volume wrecked the speakers on the first and only car I ever owned. Neither they nor my eardrums were ever quite the same.) All things considered, though, it’s an uneven setlist whose other big novelty is the absence of Donna Jean on harmony vocals, leaving Phil to cover her high parts in one of his last great live vocal performances. As perhaps the only Dick’s Picks entry to stay in print over the years (I bought my copy from the combination FYE-Gift Shop at the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2009), this show is by no means starved for attention. Save that for the previous night, which is all too easy to overlook. For the occasion, I listened to the Dusborne/Droncit matrix because of its completeness. I’ve heard the crystal-clear soundboard mix on DP1 many times more, and you should too! Set One Promised Land is a boilerplate opener, but tonight’s Sugaree is sloooow. You wouldn’t be missing much were you to start with Mexicali Blues, which is a dependable shot of adrenaline on just about all occasions. Even then, Dire Wolf and Black-Throated Wind are back-to-back mid-tempo stiltedness. By and large, I don’t love what the band was doing with either of these numbers during this period. There’s just no juice to them, rhythmically. Candyman too is sloppy in lots of frustrating little ways, but Jerry throws in an unexpectedly soaring wah-heavy solo that needs to be heard to be believed. It always tickles me that Bob Weir had three songs in steady rotation with almost the exact same intro: just him strumming an E major suspended fourth figure on that nasally Gibson SG he was using at the time. Once you recognize the chord, it’s a toss-up between whether you’re getting a Jack Straw (yay!), an LLR (not yay…), or yet another Black-Throated Wind (maybe yay?). Big Railroad Blues is our first point of overlap with DP1. It’s not hard to see why it made the cut: the whole band snaps to attention, as if they missed the alarm clock and were instead abruptly awoken by the screech of a passing train. Billy and his snare drum are the stars of the show here, and the same goes for the subsequent Big River. Jerry does better work beneath the verses than during his solos, while Keith hammers out prickly chords (predicting the blunt approach he’d take to the keys from fall ‘77 onwards, of which I’m not a big fan). Then comes the celebrated Here Comes Sunshine that Dick Latvala cleverly slotted as disc 1, track 1 of DP1 to ensure that it would not be ignored. The penultimate rendition before the song was shelved for two decades, it represents the best the band ever accomplished within its framework. Prior performances benefitted from Donna’s high harmonies, but often had messy transitions between the various phases of the central jam section. Not the case here. We get a complex, multisection jam with immaculate dynamic range and intricate details from every band member that reward repeat listens. The song’s place in the live canon is also an interesting one. To my ears, it effectively inherited the funky C7 jam that used to happen under Pigpen’s Good Lovin’ raps and which later gets reincarnated as the chorus of Shakedown Street. The high of Here Comes Sunshine carries over into El Paso and Ramble On Rose, with Bobby and Keith as inspired as ever. Phil answers Keith’s histrionics on the latter with a low-frequency explosion or two that must have made plaster crumble from the ceiling. Hopefully Florida was not asbestos country. Lindsay Planer’s review of Dick’s Picks, Vol. 1 on Allmusic incorrectly names this Playing in the Band as the track that suffered the injudicious loss of Phil’s bass solo on the official release. This claim used to confuse the hell out of me. When was there ever a full-on bass solo in Playin’? Maybe in the top-shelf November ‘72 versions, but not here, that’s for sure. In fact, that notorious edit occurs in set two during The Other One. Rather, this Playing in the Band features your expected high-octane modal jam that can shift between hypnotizing and monotonous, depending on your mood. Unlike the limber Sunshine that came before, this jam (and many others like it) is all gas, no breaks—and not necessarily in a good way. As in Big River Keith spikes the punch with bluesy tritone stingers that play into the stereotype of 1973 as the Dead’s “jazz age.” Phil echoes that dissonance heading into the homestretch of the jam section, which prompts Jerry and Bobby to answer with a series of chromatic riffs. An awesome burst of feedback announces the reprise of the chorus, replacing Donna’s usual yayayay-ing. Set Two Like the night before, the band comes out swinging with a unique combo of Mississippi Half-Step into Me and Bobby McGee. (The theme of the night is apparently “no codas”; neither Mississippi nor He’s Gone have their usual vocal codas, perhaps because they figured that the Florida crowd wasn’t in a singalong kinda mood or simply because Donna’s absence made things too complicated. Instead, we get more Jerry solos; a fair tradeoff, I’d say!) Who knows why the segue from Mississippi into Bobby McGee wasn’t included on the official release. It’s a delicious hairpin transition, initiated by Weir as soon as it’s clear that there will be no “across the Rio Grand-ee-oh” refrain to cap off this Half-Step. The latter song is also a spirited rendition of the Kristofferson staple (the band’s second recurring tribute to the memory of Janis Joplin after Bird Song, I assume) that leaves the previous night’s performance in the dust. Row Jimmy is the one Dead song that took me the longest to warm up to. To my younger self, it was a case of Jerry being laid-back to a fault. It’s since grown on me as one of the Dead’s best tunes for singing along, not to mention the wonders of its deceptively simple arrangement. As Billy would point out, the trick is in realizing that it’s fundamentally a reggae pastiche, albeit not in the embarrassing “cod reggae” tradition of Dyer Maker, Clapton’s Eye Shot the Sheriff, or early Police. In concert, it was also an excuse for Jerry to show off his crystalline slide guitar technique. Lyrically, Row Jimmy is cut from the same cloth as Here Comes Sunshine. The picture it paints reminds me of the sequence in Ponyo where the world is flooded, yet the people are… strangely chill about it? Only the Grateful Dead and Miyazaki could make an apocalyptic deluge sound like a whimsical summer afternoon. The meat of the second set is a 45-minute He’s Gone > Truckin’ > The Other One sequence. He’s Gone is my number one Dead composition, although not many of its live renditions truly stand out from one another—at least not so far as the main song portion is concerned. Keith in particular makes this one (to quote a review below) one for the books. Again, tonight the band foregoes the eerie “Nothing’s gonna bring him back” coda, which often took on a gospel flavour (I especially love the ‘73 versions where Phil sings bass-baritone underneath the others). Instead, we’re treated to a cascading instrumental outro that is at first ethereal and grows gradually more and more bluesy until the band fires into Truckin’. In 1973 and early 1974, Truckin’ would often feature an interpolation of Blind Willie Johnson’s gospel-blues Nobody’s Fault But Mine. The transition from the former’s jaunty shuffle to the latter’s ominous descending bassline is to die for. For those of us who like to puzzle over the lyrical “narrative” of Grateful Dead setlists, the Truckin’ > Nobody’s pairing is an intriguing proposition: “Sick of the open road? Shoulda read yer damn Bible!” At last, we get to the matter of the deleted bass solo. I’ve seen this mongrel creation called the “Deconstructed Phil-O Stomp” or just the “Decon Jam,” descended from the so-called “Phil-O Stomp” that was played on a handful of occasions in October ‘72 (I believe the only officially-released version is from the 72-10-18 show on the Listen to the River box set). Here, in its final incarnation, Phil turns the original off-kilter riff inside-out. It’s not hard to imagine why Phil personally vetoed its inclusion on the official CD. As he describes it, it’s just him strumming a kind of warped and heavily distorted blues shuffle on the upper strings of his bass. It’s more of a chord progression than a melodic solo, and consequently it might sound clunky if you weren’t aware that it’s an obscure iteration on an even more obscure motif! More than that, the “Decon Jam” is a prime example of Phil’s unique practice of playing the PA system like its own instrument, using his deepest frequencies to coax terrifying sounds from the band’s army of speakers. All told, it’s a 5 minute section of prime experimental Dead, including some nifty ensemble improvisation, that can only be heard today on audience tapes. Bobby sings one verse of The Other One before we get back to the jam. Jerry announces that things are about to get crazy by bouncing a syncopated rhythm off of Bobby’s vamp. The late 1973 shows are treasured for just how noisy and downright scary the peak jam segments would get. Tonight’s meltdown is a candidate for the defining jam of this period, pushing for sounds both louder and more intense than those heard the night before. Still, I’ll venture to argue that yesterday’s Dark Star sequence holds up to repeat listens better than tonight’s Other One jam, if only because the former’s set two denouement is stronger overall. I could take or leave Stella Blue on most nights; it’s not a great set of lyrics, but Jerry knows precisely how to make it magical—more so in later years than in these early versions. Tonight’s Around and Around, meanwhile, is just plain not good, with Bobby making the common mistake of thinking that screaming = soul. The Casey Jones encore, lastly, is a harbinger of things to come in 1974. Casey Jones had lost its novelty by 1971 (or Europe ‘72 at the latest, if you’re being generous), but here it settles into the slower, funkier tempo that would define the band’s ‘74 sound.
Reviewer:njpg
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December 20, 2018 Subject:
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Another brilliant MTX, and of an equally brilliant show. No part of it is less than a 5-star performance, and the bass jam showcases Phil's ongoing fascination
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with experimental noise, prologuing the Seastones sets of '74. One for the books.
Reviewer:deadheadnedwhite
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December 20, 2017 Subject:
one of the greats
a gorgeous show with gorgeous production. thanks to all involved !
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